Heretofore it has been proposed to manufacture garments in series from webs and pre-manufactured sleeves on automated production lines, a method and apparatus for such manufacture being illustrated in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 3,681,785. Using this method and apparatus, or the method and apparatus of other prior patents, such as Pierron, U.S. Pat. No. Re. 30,520, and Craig, U.S. Pat. No. 3,696,445, pre-manufactured, individual sleeves are supplied to the production line and united with continuous moving webs from which the body panels of the garment are fashioned. The individual sleeves may be placed on the continuous moving webs so that they extend transversely with respect to or are aligned with the direction of movement of the webs, depending on the type of garment being made and the details of the method used. Sleeves are shown placed so that they extend transversely to the direction of movement of the webs, and an automated sleeve placement apparatus is provided for that purpose in prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,681,785. Sleeves are shown placed in line with the direction of movement of the webs and an apparatus is provided for feeding sleeves in this manner in Craig, U.S. Pat. No. 3,696,445. Pierron, U.S. Pat. No. Re. 30,520, also discloses a method in which sleeves are placed in line with the direction of movement of the webs; such methods produce raglan sleeve style garments.
Also known are methods for making garments with sleeves from continuous webs by cutting such webs into portions of garments constituting both the body panels and the garment sleeves and assembling the garment portions by hand to form complete garments. Artzt U.S. Pat. No. 3,435,461 discloses such a method for manufacturing an infant's garment.
In addition to what is shown in such patents, methods are known and have been practiced commercially for making garments from continuous webs. Such commercial practice has involved sleeve making from continuous webs as a separate operation from the assembly of such sleeves with continuous webs to make the finished garments.
It has not been known, as far as we are aware, to incorporate sleeve making in a unified method involving sleeve making from continuous webs and transferring and combining such sleeves with continuous moving webs adapted to form the body panels of the garments, providing an overall continuous method for manufacturing garments entirely from moving webs in series and continuously in a fully automated manner.
Furthermore, while garments have been manufactured commercially with elasticized cuffs on the sleeves and the sleeves have been made in series from continuously moving webs, the attachment of the cuff elastic has involved a separate manual sewing operation on individual sleeves which has interrupted the continuous nature of the overall method.
With the objective of automating a garment making method, the sleeve transfer apparatus of U.S. Pat. No. 3,681,785 was developed for transferring sleeves from a stack and placing such sleeves on a moving web. When, however, elastic is applied to the cuffs, the cuffs are gathered by the elastic and changed from a flattened condition to a tubular condition of greater thickness. The placing of a number of sleeves with elasticized cuffs on top of one another results in an uneven stack due to the greater thickness of the cuffs, compared with the flattened condition of the armhole ends of the sleeves. Such an uneven stack raised problems with the operation in practice of the sleeve transfer apparatus shown in said U.S. Pat. No. 3,681,785.
Accordingly, it has not heretofore been found feasible to provide a continuous method which is capable of being fully automated for the manufacture of garments from moving webs including attaching elastic to the cuffs of the sleeves.